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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (2914)	10/13/1998 11:00:00 PM
From: Clarence Dodge	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

ZP I have no doubt that the Abit (Award bios) will allow you to select boot drives with the bios. I don't doubt it either given list of boot options you posted from the Abit manual. I emailed back to Abit asking how their answer to my original email (set the jumpers) was the only correct answer in lite of that manual passage which I included in the email. Its probably a misunderstanding of my question, like Dave said. With one IDE drive and one SCSI drive the choice could be made in the mobo bios. I have decided to go with the overwhelming voice of the thread and use two IDE drives (primary master/KOT slave), an external magnetic removable, SparQ maybe, and an internal tape(master) and cd-rom(slave). For example if NT has to be configured differently when it resides on a SCSI drive vs an IDE drive the cloning process may not work. My latest thinking on the KOT concept is to use two matched drives...thereby avoiding some of the unknowns. I intuitively agree. Thats another good reason here to use 2 IDE instead ( lessening the unknown complexities.) With two matched drives , do you mean size as well? How would multiple clones of the primary fit onto a same size KOT unless Daves partitions were used on the primary and only the OS partition gets cloned? Relying on the other backups to restore non-cloned material.? Thats a question BTW. You likely have something else in mind to make same sized drives work. I will try installing NT on one of my IDE drives next. If all goes well I will see if it clones to a SCSI drive. Did you figure out why NT couldn't find the SCSI drive? That would be a neat trick to get Nt onto the ScSi thru the back door via a cloned image. Good luck Clarence

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (2914)	10/14/1998 8:59:00 AM
From: Sean W. Smith	Respond to of 14778

*Has anyone used Drive Image to restore an NT Image file to an IDE drive and then restored the same Image file to an IDE drive..did it work?* Yep works fine, your points about cloning between IDE and SCSI are valid. I dunno if it will work. Haven't tried that scenario as I have Mixed IDE and SCSI but I just create KOT images not bootable paritions. Size is not an issue. Drive Image and Ghost handle this. We clone hundreds of boxes at work 95/98 using these techniques with different sized HD's with no problems. Sean

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (2914)	10/14/1998 2:04:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14778

>> if NT has to be configured differently when it resides on a SCSI drive vs an IDE drive the cloning process may not work. If NT boots from a SCSI disk the C drive has to have the a driver for the SCSI disk in its root directory in a file named NTBOOTDD.SYS. This is the same file that you need to load in the NT setup when you have a SCSI disk. This driver is NT-specific and adapter-specific. No got driver, no get boot. Or so I read--I don't have any SCSI disks myself. You do not need this driver file to boot from an IDE disk, and I do not believe its presence will affect booting from an IDE disk. I'm drawing an inference here, which is always a little dangerous with NT. But NT's multiboot capability allows you to boot either from an IDE or a SCSI drive in the same boot sequence, depending on the selection you make at boot up from the list in BOOT.INI. This tells me NT will ignore the SCSI driver if the BOOT.INI selection points it to an IDE disk. If my inference is correct, then you should be able to boot either from an IDE or a SCSI clone, PROVIDED you have the right NTBOOTDD.SYS file on both clones (though you'd only actually need it on the SCSI clone). I'm assuming the NT resident partition gets the right drive letter when you swap boot drives, probably C (if it doesn't get the right drive letter, you can't boot the clone anyhow). In any case, if the NT partition has a drive letter other than C, you have to clone all the C partition root directory files NT needs in addition to the NT partition itself. (If it is C, the root must be part of the clone.) Since I happen to know these files, I might as well list them. They are: NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, BOOT.INI, and NTBOOTDD.SYS, the last being required only for SCSI. BTW, these four (three for IDE) files will allow you to boot NT from a floppy if the C-root has been corrupted, which may partially solve your disk-failure scenario. No, you can't boot NT itself from a floppy, but you CAN boot an existing NT from a hard drive if the C-root files get clobbered. This can save you if you stomp NTLDR, for instance. You have to have formatted the floppy from NT to get an NT-bootable floppy. You can't format it from DOS or Win 95/98 -- they won't produce an NT-bootable floppy. But you CAN edit the boot.ini file from DOS on an NT-bootable floppy (even DOS booted from a floppy if you're smart enough to have EDIT.COM on the floppy). This is off the subject a bit but an interesting point in its own right and definitely germane to a KOT strategy. Spots